The Xiang Restaurant: Where to Eat in Chinatown

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Why go

Chinatown’s Smith Street is best known as “Chinatown Food Street,” a strip thick with Cantonese roast meats, Teochew porridge, and tourist-facing hawker stalls. The Xiang Restaurant stands out precisely because it doesn’t play that game — it specializes in Hunan cuisine (湘菜), the smoky, garlicky, chili-forward cooking style from Mao Zedong’s home province, which is far less common in Singapore than Cantonese or Sichuan food. Expect dishes built on dried chilies, fermented black beans, smoked pork, and cumin rather than the sweeter, gentler flavors typical of Singaporean-Chinese cooking. A 4.8 rating from nearly 1,000 reviewers is unusually high for a restaurant in this touristy pocket of the city, and it signals a kitchen that’s earned its following on food quality rather than foot traffic alone.

Getting there

The restaurant sits at 8 Smith Street, right in the heart of Chinatown, a two-minute walk from Chinatown MRT station (Exit A leads directly onto Pagoda Street, from which Smith Street is a short stroll). If coming from the Outram Park interchange (East-West, North-East, Thomson-East Coast lines), it’s roughly a 10-minute walk through the Chinatown Complex area. The street is pedestrianized in the evenings when Food Street stalls set up, so taxis and ride-hail drivers will usually drop you at the corner of Smith and New Bridge Road or Trengganu Street, leaving a short walk in.

What to eat

Hunan cooking is built around “xiang la” (香辣) — fragrant heat — rather than the numbing Sichuan mala style, so dishes lean smoky and sour-spicy instead of tongue-tingling. Look for classics like smoked/cured pork (腊肉) stir-fried with leeks, steamed fish head with chopped chili (剁椒鱼头) — arguably Hunan’s signature dish — and dry-fried string beans with minced pork. Claypot dishes and preserved vegetables (酸豆角, pickled long beans) are common menu anchors, and rice is meant to be ordered as a counterbalance to the chili oil, not skipped. Because portions in Chinese regional restaurants like this are typically meant for sharing across a table, this is a better outing for three or four people ordering five or six dishes than a solo quick bite.

When to go

Weekday dinners (around 6–7pm) tend to be calmer than weekends, when both tourists filling up Food Street and local groups seeking out regional Chinese cuisine converge on Smith Street. Lunch service is generally quieter and a good option if you want attentive service without a wait. Because the restaurant isn’t a mass-market destination the way neighboring hawker stalls are, it doesn’t experience the same peak-hour crush — but a table for a larger group is still worth reserving ahead if you’re coming on a Friday or Saturday night.

How to visit like a local

Order dishes by their Chinese names or point at the menu photos if you’re unsure of pronunciation — staff are used to non-Mandarin speakers navigating a regional cuisine that even many Singaporean Chinese diners find unfamiliar. Don’t default to ordering the mildest-sounding dish “to be safe”; ask instead for one dish adjusted to be less spicy if you’re heat-sensitive, since diluting the whole meal misses the point of Hunan cooking. Payment is typically by card or mobile payment (PayNow is standard across Singapore), with tipping neither expected nor customary — service charge, if applied, is usually already built into the bill. The most common visitor mistake here is treating it like a quick hawker stop; this is a sit-down regional restaurant meant for a proper multi-dish meal, not a five-minute plate-and-go. Since it’s still relatively under-the-radar compared to the Cantonese roast-meat stalls a few doors down, arriving without reservations on an off-peak weekday evening is usually fine — but for weekend dinners, a phone booking or walk-in early is the safer bet.

Nearby to pair with

After eating, it’s a short walk to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum, the Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road, or the stalls of the Chinatown Complex Market for dessert or a second-round snack — tau huay (soybean pudding) stalls are common in the complex’s food centre upstairs.